Pine politics: Have you gone too early with your Christmas tree this year?

1. Lifestyle

The Christmas creep seems to get earlier every year and the rules ever more complicated. As Number 10 unveils its fir, Helen Coffey digs into the complexities of arboreal etiquette and asks what does your tree say about you?

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Forget “if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. Here’s a new bit of arboreal philosophy to chew over: If you put your Christmas tree up on 30 November, does it make you posh or gauche? Is it middle-class to have multiple trees? And are coordinated decorations common or classy?

For a nation that imported the Christmas tree tradition from elsewhere – we have Queen Victoria’s German husband Prince Albert to thank for its widespread adoption – Brits sure have a lot of opinions about what constitutes the “correct” way of doing things.

First up, there’s the increasingly spicy debate on when your greenery should go up. Dubbed by some ‘The Big Treekend’, 33 per cent of people put up their tree the first weekend of the month. As that is slightly later this year, with the first December weekend falling on Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th of December, many have gone for first Sunday of Advent which fell on 30 November.

This, to me, feels somewhat excessive (if nothing else, that’s a lot of pine needles to vacuum at a time when you’d preferably keep housework to the bare minimum). If I manage to get myself into gear at all, it’s usually in a stressed-out, mildly hungover whirlwind come the middle of December.

But a huge number of my peers seem to disagree. “You’ve got to have it up by 1 December!” one friend told me, outraged. “Otherwise you won’t get the most out of it!” I’m not even sure what getting the “most” out of a tree looks like, other than regularly stopping to admire it and smiling like you’re cosplaying being in a John Lewis ad.

Perhaps I should commend their restraint though: I’ve watched aghast as this year trees started going up from the first week of November. In some cases, the second the Halloween decorations came down on my street, the wreaths, tinsel and gaudy front-garden displays of light-up Santas and gurning elves took their place.

While no one ever comes right out and says it, there can be a sneering judgement about these early adopters. The implication seems to be that the more upper class you are, the later you leave it to join in with all the festive rigmarole.

Traditionally, trees used to go up at the last possible moment, displayed from Christmas Eve (24 December) until Twelfth Night or Epiphany (6 January), which marked the official end of the Christmas celebrations. Now, Christmas creep has got earlier and earlier every year – you only have to look at when the ubiquitous saccharine commercials start coming out – and trees have merely followed suit.

Etiquette expert William Hanson has made no secret of the fact that he thinks a sophisticated British Christmas tree has no business being erected prior to the last weekend before 25 December. Putting it up earlier is “common as muck”. If you’re going to put it up early, “at least wait until the month is December,” he recently instructed on a podcast. Shared on social media, the clip attracted thousands of heated comments debating the “proper” time to deck the halls.

Then there’s face-off between fake versus real trees; Hanson believes the former is “downmarket” (deforestation be damned). Oh, and tinsel and coloured lights are also a no-no for the discerning decorator, he claims, with white or off-white lights the only acceptable way to go, alongside a classic star or angel for the top of the evergreen.

While no one ever comes right out and says it, there can be a sneering judgement about these early adopters

Whatever your attitude towards sparkle and bling, decorations are one of those strange areas where, in fact, having all-matching, colour-coordinated ornaments feels decidedly naff. It’s giving soulless, corporate Christmas – “this holiday season is brought to you by Unilever!” – whereas everyone knows a real tree is imbued with heart and soul through a random, hodge-podge assortment of bric-a-brac. The tackier the better, as far as I’m concerned: baubles passed down from your great aunt, plastic hanging nativity scenes erratically painted by your nieces, homemade felt animals in Santa hats purchased when tipsy from a church fete...

The final tree battleground is a relatively recent phenomenon: should you keep to one tree only? Or should you splurge on multiple, ensuring that every reception room is equally festive? What about a smaller one to greet people in the hallway, or a stylish twig tucked away in an alcove on the landing for some extra cheer?

Being a two or three-tree household could be the new Christmas status symbol, much like flashing a Rolex or parking a Porsche on the driveway. Not only does it prove that your house is big enough to accommodate a small woodland, it also means that you have the disposable income to shell out for what has become an ever-more excessive investment. After all, that non-drop Nordmann Fir could set you back over two hundred quid this year, depending on your ceiling heights.

When it comes to trees – and, in fact, all of our festive traditions – maybe we should save the pithy judgement and take a leaf out of that purveyor of all things etiquette, Debrett’s. “There is certainly no one template for an ideal Christmas, and every family has evolved their own set of customs and traditions,” reads its advice. “They may have their own day when they deem it is correct to put up the Christmas tree (or eschew it altogether), and many families will disinter an eclectic range of decorations which are rooted their own history (old fashioned baubles handed down by their parents, kids’ school projects etc).”

So there you have it. When it comes to Christmas, the rules are, there are no rules. Turns out Christmas trees are just as philosophically ambiguous as the regular kind.

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